WHMNet System

World Heritage Memory Net (WHMNet) uses the advanced LINUX/MySQL/PHP-based Integrated Multimedia Content Retrieval System (i-M-C-S) which Professor Chen and her R & D Group developed for WHMNet and Global Memory Net (GMNet) from 2005 until August 2010 at Simmons College under the sponsorship of the US National Science Foundation, and Global Connection and Collaboration (GlobalCC) from September 2010 to the present.

WHMNet provides multilingual, multimedia and multiformat resources on all World Heritage properties from museums, archives, libraries, and world bibliographic and Web resources, and includes photographs, videos, audio clips, and documents. To accommodate WHMNet's needs, much modification and enhancement of the i-M-C-S system had to be made, and many new features were added, which resulted in WHMNet's unique multilingual, temporal, and geographic retrieval capabilities. These include Map Search, Country Search, Timeline Search, as well as Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) which allows instant cross-country, cross-cultural retrieval of images of similar nature, color and shape.*

Currently the WHMNet Collection contains more than 43,700 images, 27 video tours, many more video documentaries from available sources, including links to about 190 videos on world heritage sites. Detailed descriptive information is presented in multilingual format in at least 6 UNESCO official languages and in many additional languages when available. In total, more than 100 world languages are represented.